To make it easier to draw using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro on my laptop (a Lenovo X220 tablet PC), I’ve created several templates with consistent dot grids and sizes. Since I want to minimize typing when I’m drawing, I wrote a couple of functions to make it easier to copy these templates and set up appropriately-named files. That way, I can save them without the grid layer, flip between files using Sketchbook Pro’s next/previous file commands, and then process them all when I’m ready.

Index cards

I’ve been experimenting with a habit of drawing at least five index cards every day. Here’s a function that creates five index cards (or a specified number of them) and then opens the last one for me to edit.

I might tweak the files a little more after I rename them, so I don’t automatically upload them. When I’m happy with the files, I use a Node script to upload the files to Flickr, move them to my To blog directory, and copy Org-formatted text that I can paste into my learning outline.

Automatically resize images

The image+ package is handy for displaying the images so that they’re scaled to the window size.

By using Emacs Lisp functions to set up files that I’m going to use in an external application, I minimize fussing about with the keyboard while still being able to take advantage of structured information.

Do you work with external applications? Where does it make sense to use Emacs Lisp to make setup or processing easier?

How do you take notes in Org? Are you buried in a heap of uncategorized notes? Do you manually open the right file and navigate to the right heading? Are you mystified by org-capture and org-refile? Here’s a path that can help you learn how to more efficiently take (and organize!) notes in Org Mode.

Set up a keyboard shortcut to go to your main Org file

Use org-refile to file or jump to headings

Use org-capture to write notes quickly

Define your own org-capture templates for greater convenience

Pull in additional information

Step 1. Set up a keyboard shortcut to go to your main Org file

Instead of using C-x C-f (find-file) all the time, set up shortcuts to jump to the Org files you use the most. This way, you can easily type that keyboard shortcut, go to the end of the file, and add your note. Here’s some sample code that sets the C-c o shortcut to open organizer.org in your home directory. You can add it to your ~/.emacs.d/init.el and then call M-x eval-buffer to load the changes.

Alternatively, you can use registers, which are Emacs data structures that can hold text, file references, and more. The following code sets the o register to organizer.org in your home directory:

(set-register ?o (cons 'file "~/organizer.org"))

You can then jump to it with C-x r j (jump-to-register), specifying o at the prompt.

Once you’re in your Org file, you can use M-> (end-of-buffer) to go to the end of the file, or you can use C-s (isearch-forward) to search for some text.

You’ll still need to switch back to your original buffer or window configuration when you’re done, but that’s something you can fix when you learn how to use org-capture.

Step 2. Use org-refile to file or jump to headings

The next improvement is to use org-refile to move the current subtree to a specified heading, or jump to one without moving any text. This will let you quickly go to a project or task from anywhere in Org Mode.

By default, org-refile will show you only the top-level headings of the current file. Let’s configure it to show you headings from all your agenda files. You can use M-x customize-variable to change org-refile-targets. Click on the INS button, then click on Value menu next to Identify target headline by. Change this to Max level number. In the Integer field, fill in a suitably high number, like 6. This is the maximum depth of headings that will be shown.

If you prefer to set your variables using Emacs Lisp, here’s the code that you can add it to your ~/.emacs.d/init.el. Call M-x eval-buffer to load the changes.

(setq org-refile-targets '((org-agenda-files . (:maxlevel . 6))))

Be sure to add your main Org Mode file to your agenda list. You can do so by going to the file and typing C-c [ (org-agenda-file-to-front), or by setting the org-agenda-files variable.

The standard Emacs completion interface isn’t as friendly as it could be. I use the Helm package to make it easier to select and complete input. Since Helm can be a little complex, you may want to start with ido-mode instead. Here’s how you can set Ido up to use with Org Mode:

(ido-mode)
(setq org-completion-use-ido t)

Once you’ve set up your org-refile-targets, your agenda files, and either Helm or Ido, you can get the hang of using org-refile. The standard keyboard shortcut for org-refile is C-c C-w when you’re in an Org Mode buffer. org-refile can do different things depending on how you call it:

By default, it moves the current subtree to the specified location.

If you call it with the prefix argument C-u (like so: C-u C-c C-w), it jumps to the specified location instead of moving the current subtree.

If you call it as C-u C-u C-c C-w, it jumps to the previous refiling location.

First, practise using it with the prefix argument (C-u C-c C-w) to jump to a location. Once you’ve gotten the hang of that, go to some of your uncategorized entries and use org-refile without the prefix argument (just C-c C-w) to move the entries to the right place.

org-refile gives you a quick way to jump to a heading, but you still have to find your way back to whatever you were working on before you wanted to take a note. After you’re comfortable with refiling notes to the right place, move on to learning how to use org-capture to quickly take notes from anywhere.

Step 3. Use org-capture to write notes quickly

org-capture can help you take notes quickly by popping up a window or leading you through prompts. When you’re done taking the note, it will return you to whatever you were looking at before you started. In order to take advantage of this, though, you’ll need to customize org-capture.

You can use M-x customize-variable to set org-default-notes-file to the filename you would like notes to be saved to, or set it in Emacs Lisp code like this:

(setq org-default-notes-file "~/organizer.org")

Make sure that the file exists and is automatically opened in Org Mode.

If you type C-c c, org-capture will display a prompt. t is a simple task template, and C will show you the customization interface for org-capture-templates.

Let’s start with t. It will show you a buffer with a simple TODO entry. You can fill in the rest of the details, use C-c C-s (org-schedule) to schedule it for a particular day, set the deadline with C-c C-d (org-deadline), etc. You can change the TODO keyword or delete it.

When you’re done, type C-c C-c to automatically save it to your default notes file (as specified by org-default-notes-file). Changed your mind? Cancel with C-c C-k. After either C-c C-c or C-c C-k, you should be back to whatever it was that you were working on.

Practise using C-c c (org-capture) to quickly jot down several tasks or notes. Then go to your notes file and use C-c C-w (org-refile) to move the notes to the right place.

You can also refile the notes right from the capture buffer. Instead of typing C-c C-c to finish your note, use C-c C-w to refile it.

Get the hang of using org-capture to take notes, organizing them every so often (maybe at the end of your day, or once a week?) or refiling them as you go.

Step 4. Define your own org-capture-templates for greater convenience

If you find yourself capturing different kinds of notes often or you want to capture in another format (table entry? list item?), invest the time in customizing org-capture-templates. In the beginning, you might find the Customize interface you get from M-x customize-variableorg-capture-templates to be easier to work with than setting the values in plain Emacs Lisp, since the Customize interface lists the options. Read the documentation and look at examples of how other people have configured their org-capture-templates for more ideas. I have quite a few templates defined in my config, and http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html has a number of templates too.

Step 5. Pull in additional information

org-capture and org-refile are great when you’re at your computer, but what if you’re away? Quite a few people use MobileOrg to take quick notes on the go. I haven’t gotten around to setting that up for my workflow properly; instead, I use Evernote to jot quick notes on my phone. As part of my weekly review process, I look at the notes in my Evernote inbox and copy them into Emacs as needed.

You can manually copy information from your preferred non-Emacs note-taking tools, or you can figure out an automatic way of doing so. For example, I have some code to copy Evernote notes titled “Journal” into an Org Mode file structured by year-month-day.

Tweak your workflow!

Here’s a quick sketch showing some of your workflow options when it comes to capturing and organizing information with Org Mode. Which combination do you prefer, and how could you make it even better?

It turns out that coaching someone on Emacs goes really quickly when you can sit side by side. I’ve been helping Sean Miller with Org Mode and Emacs Lisp, with the condition that he has to turn those notes into blog posts. Since he happens to live in the same neighbourhood, this is pretty convenient.

E-mailing snippets back and forth would’ve been tedious, and working on only one of the computers would’ve slowed us down. I remembered Christopher Wellons‘ demonstration of impatient-mode, which lets you display your buffer contents on a web page that automatically updates when you make changes. Here’s what I did:

Then Sean was able to easily copy text from my screen and try things out on his computer. For example, we dug into org-capture-templates to find out how to create datetree items that were also scheduled on the specified date in the agenda, and we converted his manually-dated headings to include active timestamps so that those would be on the agenda too. It would’ve been a hassle to dictate or re-type the regular expressions, and since we were changing the code rapidly based on our conversation, e-mail would’ve been a hassle. Using impatient-mode worked out well.

What did I like about this two-computer setup? I had access to all my configuration files so that I could easily pick up snippets, and I could demonstrate interesting features as I figured out the code or explained my approach. At the same time, he had access to all of his files and he could take notes in his own buffer. We didn’t have to fuss about with keybindings.

This kind of setup could probably work with a virtual coaching session, too, especially if both people have multiple monitors or if there was an easy way to switch between views.

Want to get notified about upcoming hangouts? You can sign up for notifications at http://eepurl.com/bbi-Ir . We’ll experiment with starting off with a mini-workshop/demo of Org tasks and agenda (or maybe Helm, if that’s more interesting).

org-mode to pdf to bypass creative cloud / scribus.. but learning latex also. ah thats what i needed to hear cheers jason for sure.. i’m glad i stopped by maybe we also look at where is emacs deficient? can we collaborate on a tool, a bug or whatever. good idea. or we spit out our command history for ideas

Anyway, I’m making do. Thanks to Node and the abundance of libraries available through NPM, Javascript is shaping up to be a surprisingly useful scripting language.

After I used the Flickr API library for Javascript to cross-reference my Flickr archive with my blog posts, I looked around for other things I could do with it. photoSync occasionally didn’t upload new pictures I added to its folders (or at least, not as quickly as I wanted). I wanted to replace photoSync with my own script that would:

upload the picture only if it doesn’t already exist,

add tags based on the filename,

add the photo to my Sketchbook photoset,

move the photo to the “To blog” folder, and

make it easy for me to refer to the Flickr image in my blog post or index.

The flickr-with-uploads library made it easy to upload images and retrieve information, although the format was slightly different from the Flickr API library I used previously. (In retrospect, I should’ve checked the Flickr API documentation first – there’s an example upload request right on the main page. Oh well! Maybe I’ll change it if I feel like rewriting it.)

I searched my existing photos to see if a photo with that title already existed. If it did, I displayed an Org-style list item with a link. If it didn’t exist, I uploaded it, set the tags, added the item to the photo set, and moved it to the folder. Then I displayed an Org-style link, but using a plus character instead of a minus character, taking advantage of the fact that both + and – can be used for lists in Org.

While using console.log(...) to display these links in the terminal allowed me to mark and copy the link, I wanted to go one step further. Could I send the links directly to Emacs? I looked into getting org-protocol to work, but I was having problems figuring this out. (I solved those problems; details later in this post.)

What were some other ways I could get the information into Emacs aside from copying and pasting from the terminal window? Maybe I could put text directly into the clipboard. The node-clipboard package didn’t build for me and I couldn’t get node-copy-paste to work either,about the node-copy-paste README told me about the existence of the clip command-line utility, which worked for me.

On Windows, clip allows you to pipe the output of commands into your clipboard. (There are similar programs for Linux or Mac OS X.) In Node, you can start a child process and communicate with it through pipes.

I got a little lost trying to figure out how to turn a string into a streamable object that I could set as the new standard input for the clip process I was going to spawn, but the solution turned out to be much simpler than that. Just write(...) to the appropriate stream, and call end() when you’re done.

Here’s the relevant bit of code that takes my result array and puts it into my clipboard:

Of course, to get to that point, I had to revise my script. Instead of letting all the callbacks finish whenever they wanted, I needed to be able to run some code after everything was done. I was a little familiar with the async library, so I used that. I copied the output to the clipboard instead of displaying it so that I could call it easily using ! (dired-do-shell-command) and get the output in my clipboard for easy yanking elsewhere, although I could probably change my batch file to pipe the result to clip and just separate the stderr stuff. Hmm. Anyway, here it is!

and away I went. Not only did I have a handy way to process images from the command line, I could also mark the files in Emacs Dired with m, then type ! to execute my up command on the selected images. Mwahaha!

Anyway, I thought I’d write it up in case other people were curious about using Node to code little utilities, filling the clipboard in Windows, or getting data back into Emacs (sometimes the clipboard is enough).

Back to org-protocol, since I was curious about it. With (require 'org-protocol) (server-start), emacsclient org-protocol://store-link:/foo/bar worked when I entered it at the command prompt. I was having a hard time getting it to work under Node, but eventually I figured out that:

I needed to pass -n as one of the arguments to emacsclient so that it would return right away.

The : after store-link is important! I was passing org-protocol://store-link/foo/bar and wondering why it opened up a file called bar. org-protocol://store-link:/foo/bar was what I needed.

I only just figured out that last bit while writing this post. Here’s a small demonstration program:

Update 2015-02-17: Or you can just use %t in your org-capture-templates, as Seth Mason points out in the comments… =)

How can you get Org Mode to create and schedule entries within a year-month-day outline structure? You can define an org-capture-templates with the keyword file+datetree+prompt. This lets you specify a date for your entry, and Org will create the entry in a hierarchy organized by year, month, and day.

If you’d like to display the entry in your agenda, you’ll also need an active timestamp of the form <yyyy-mm-dd>. Fortunately, you can reuse the date you specified at the initial prompt to create the datetree entry. Looking at org-capture.el will show you that the org-capture function refers to the org-read-date-final-answer, which is set to whatever string you entered at the date prompt. For example, if you entered 18, then org-read-date-final-answer will be set to 18. You can use org-read-date to convert this back to a yyyy-mm-dd-style date.

How do you use this in org-capture-templates? You can use the %(...) syntax for calling an Emacs Lisp expression, like so:

Recent comments

JohnKitchin Thanks. That matches my current understanding too. It seems like use-package pretty conveniently installs and configures packages. I have seen cask for creating and installing... – Emacs configuration and use-package